The most interesting of these three Furtwangler reissues comes on the new Novello Legend label with the coupling of a famous but still comparatively rare pre-war studio recording of Beethoven's Fifth and the equally famous but more widely reissued 1938 studio account of Tchaikovsky's Pathetique. During Eric Wen's editorship of the Novello-owned Musical Tines the paper showed, among other things, considerable scholarly interest in matters of musical interpretation (I have already referred in these columns to Paul Banks's fine Mahler articles) and this Novello Legend series seems to complement that in the most practical possible way. It is also interesting that Cyril Ehrlich's note does the relatively rare thing of addressing both the Furtwangler question and the performances on the record. So, too, does Andre Tubeuf in the French note for EMI References, but it is surprising how many notes merely waffle on about Furtwangler in general, not least the DG note and the English note for the References CD. The only blot on the Novello presentational escutcheon must be the designer typesetting that removes the umlaut from Furtwangler's name.
The Novello disc is exceptionally well filled, 80 minutes in all, and, indeed, I thought the transfer of the Pathetique unusually sweet and satisfying, less coarse and metallic-sounding than some one has heard. (Different transfers seem to operate at marginally different pitches but as I don't know what the BPO tuned to in 1938, or what the weather was like during the sessions, I am in no position to say who is right.) I have never thought this to be the one and only version of the Pathetique, a Pathetique for all seasons, though there are those who so swear. But it is a profoundly considered, deeply felt, and generally eloquently played account of the great work. The trouble is one of the first LPs I ever bought was Mravinsky's mono Leningrad recording on DG, and whatever we hacks may protest to the contrary a great deal of record reviewing starts from premisses rooted in sentiments aroused by just such seminal experiences.
To anyone familiar with Furtwangler's lugubrious post-war accounts of Beethoven's Fifth, this 1937 studio account will come as something of a shock. In the symphony's coda it is really too fiery, the tempo already sufficiently accelerated to make further acceleration implausible. But it is easy to see why at the time this performance excited collectors as much as Carlos Kleiber's was to do 40 years later on DG. The performance has not appeared on LP very often but unless memory is playing me false a References LP put out some years ago provided a clearer and cleaner transfer than the present one. I was really quite shocked by the muted sound on the Novello CD in the Fifth and ended up playing it at quite a high level with the controls set so as generally to lighten and brighten the textures.
EMI's 1954 studio Fifth is well recorded, with the microphones set in such a way as to give the black-toned cellos and basses a startling presence but the performance is at times very laboured. True, there are some moments of sudden illumination: moments of truculence, fantastic colours in the scherzo, rhythms that are finely sprung for all their steady implacability. But it does not add up to a cogent, let alone great, performance in the way that Klemperer's more or less contemporary mono Philharmonia Fifth did. Klemperer's projection of the rhythms may occasionally be a shade 'flatter' than Furtwangler's but his control of the larger structure and his superbly logical matching of the basic pulse of the scherzo and the finale made for a performance of great inevitability: lofty, grand, unforced, and yet very exciting. EMI's present CD coupling is the Seventh Symphony, a 1950 studio recording, with the Vienna Musikverein sounding, alas, like a great reverberant funeral vault.
For this reason is is possible to prefer the live 1953 Berlin Seventh on DG. The recording is less boomy and the first oboe is less acid-toned. Furtwangler's account of the Seventh sounds very traditional now, with a slowish Allegretto, a dragging third movement Trio, very few repeats (only those at the start of the finale are observed), and generally measured tempos. Yet it is quite astonishing how so heroic and so broadly based a reading can also harbour within its loins such fires. Furtwangler's sense of rhythmic dynamism rarely deserts him. This Seventh offers us Dionysus masquerading as Hercules.
Unfortunately, the performance of the Eighth Symphony, the companion piece on this DG disc is a write-off. It is lugubriously conducted and boomily recorded, and there is not even an exposition repeat in the first movement.'